__________________It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much — everything — in a flash — before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.

AT 4:46 P.M. yesterday afternoon, PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP delivered REP. DAN DONOVAN (R-N.Y.) an endorsement the lawmaker had long been waiting for. Donovan is running against MICHAEL GRIMM, a former House Republican who was recently in prison. The district they’re running in is Staten Island and Brooklyn, a narrowly Republican swath of New York City that voted for Trump overwhelmingly. Grimm has positioned Donovan as insufficiently supportive of Trump’s legislative agenda. Needless to say, this is one of the districts in America where Trump could be helpful.

-- TRUMP, on Twitter: “There is no one better to represent the people of N.Y. and Staten Island (a place I know very well) than @RepDanDonovan, who is strong on Borders & Crime, loves our Military & our Vets, voted for Tax Cuts and is helping me to Make America Great Again. Dan has my full endorsement! … Very importantly, @RepDanDonovan will win for the Republicans in November...and his opponent will not. Remember Alabama. We can’t take any chances on losing to a Nancy Pelosi controlled Democrat!”

THERE’S ONLY ONE PROBLEM. Donovan voted against the tax-cut bill. He voted against it three times. He voted against it in every incarnation. The only material reason Trump gave to support Donovan was incorrect. Not only did Donovan vote against it, he was vocally opposed to it. He called it a “tax hike on the people I represent.”

AN UNFORCED ERROR -- and an embarrassing one at that for the leader of the Republican Party. YA GOTTA WONDER: What is going on in the White House? It’s tough to think of a mistake easier to avoid than whether a lawmaker voted for the largest legislative achievement of the past two years.

Donald Trump is deliberately forcing millions of Americans into financial ruin, cruelly depriving them of food and other basic protections while lavishing vast riches on the super-wealthy, the United Nations monitor on poverty has warned.

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The Federal Reserve annual economic survey released last week underlines the large pool of people who are vulnerable to any further erosion of the safety net. It found that four out of 10 Americans are so hard up they could not cover an emergency expense of $400 without borrowing money or selling possessions.

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As one of the world’s wealthiest societies, the US is what Alston calls a “land of stark contrasts”. It is home to one in four of the world’s 2,208 billionaires.

At the other end of the spectrum, 40 million Americans live in poverty. More than five million eke out an existence amid the kind of absolute deprivation normally associated with the developing world.

The symptoms of such glaring inequality include:

Americans now live shorter and sicker lives than citizens of other rich democracies;

Tropical diseases that flourish in conditions of poverty are on the rise;

The US incarceration rate remains the highest in the world;

Voter registration levels are among the lowest in industrialised nations – 64% of the voting-age population, compared with 91% in Canada and the UK and 99% in Japan.

Against that backdrop, the UN rapporteur identifies a slew of what he calls “aggressively regressive” policies coming out of the Trump administration that are sending the country “full steam ahead” towards greater inequality. In addition to the tax breaks, there are new for welfare recipients, cuts of up to a third in the program, a recent from housing secretary Ben Carson to triple the base rent for federally subsidized housing, and a burning of government regulations that offered protections to middle-class and poor families.

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Fast forward to 2017, and in Europe the 1% has edged up to 12% of national income. But in America the same elite now gobbles up 20%.

Last year the IMF, a world body not renowned for being hyper-critical of countries that fail the poor, said: “The US economy is delivering better living standards for only the few. Household incomes are stagnating, job opportunities are deteriorating, prospects for upward mobility are waning and economic gains are increasingly accruing to those that are already wealthy.”